What is the status of this ongoing email issue?

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We are terribly sorry for the ongoing email issues and not having an ETA for when will be resolved. For anyone who has not been following the situation here is a summary.

Homestead recently implemented a new spam filter which has had some repercussions. Many customers are experiencing slowness and delivery problems due to an unusual amount of spam. In addition some customer email accounts are not showing up on the Email Manager screen. Our email admins are working diligently to fix the problem by building new email servers with an improved spam filter. It will take some time to get the new servers installed and configured as well as get any remaining black lists issues resolved. Since this is a major upgrade there are numerous complexities we are dealing with. Therefore we still do not have a definitive ETA.

What can I do?

1. If you need an update on the email situation, you can visit the announcement thread here.

2. We understand that for many of you, your email is a critical component of your business. Since we do not have an ETA, you may wish to set up an email account through another provider such as Zoho, or Google.

3. If you do create an email account with a different provider you will need to update your MX records through the Domain Manager screen on Homestead.com See instructions

This thread will remain open for questions if anyone needs help changing their MX records, please post below.

Please do not use this thread for posting complaints or venting. We do understand how frustrating this is for many of you but I need to keep this thread focused on helping customers. If you would like to voice a complaint pleasepost here

I've replied to customer's emails and I am not receiving any failure messages, however, my customer called to make sure everything was ok as they had not received my last two emails.
I was not even aware that my email didn't work since no error message.
She gave me an alternate email to try, but she didn't receive my email there either. The issue is definitely on my end as she has received emails from outside organizations to both of her accounts recently- just not mine!

I am getting slammed with spam! I have marked as spam, and deleted many hundreds, if not thousands of spam emails! Most are for male enhancement. I will never, ever buy such a product. My business emails are getting buried under all the spam. I only get to do business in the Fall, as I have a small apple orchard. This is killing my business at a critical time. I reported this the other day. Of course the person I spoke with was very sorry. Not as sorry as me. When will this harassment stop?

This has been an issue for a few days now, and it is about to cost me a $300,000.00 a year account, and our total gross sales are projected at $700,000.00. That's just under half our sales. We have changed to GMAIL for the interim, but we have only just found out about the problem. It would have been nice if someone would have sent out a notice to us, your customers, or should I say, soon to be ex-customers.

Definitely should have sent out a notification telling us what was going on without making us look at a status page...at least email us all to go to that page for continued updates. Inform us what they were doing explain the issues and what could happen so we could have all taken measures AHEAD of time and not have to spend days reacting to angry customers who just think you are ignoring them...VERY UNPROFESSIONAL WAY TO HANDLE THIS SITUATION HOMESTEAD! Intuit would not have handled things this way that's for sure!

I agree. I've spent 36 years building a reputation for reliability and responsiveness in my law practice, and that reputation has been damaged immensely by the failure of Intuit/Homestead to provide some kind of notice to us that our inbound and outbound emails are being delayed, sometimes by a number of days. My clients can't understand it, and when they are the ones that have to bring it to my attention, because my email service provider took no steps to let me know about the problem, it makes me look and feel like a fool.

Hi Amy4027, For this particular issue, sending out a massive email blast to millions of addresses would have made matters worse. The system was already overloaded with massive amounts of spam. As a contingency plan, we always post updates to this Community, as well as status.homestead.com, our Facebook page, and Twitter. Are you still having issues?

You are contently having issue with e-mail this is causing my company to losses money. If it isn’t issues receiving it is issues sending something has got to give or we will have no choice and change providers. We pay too much money to your company to have e-mail issues on a weekly to almost daily basses.

I know that there have been major email issues recently. However, many of my clients have said that the emails they are sending to my domain connected email account are bouncing as undeliverable. Is this issue being fixed with the new servers?

"Yes.. once all of the setup and configuration is done, it will resolve that problem"........That statement means nothing. CAN YOU AT LEAST SUPPLY US WITH THE LIST OF EMPLOYEE'S THAT ARE GOING TO BE FIRED BECAUSE OF THIS, I'm sure all of us would like to have them on a do not hire list....

Occasionally in the last few days my partner has tried to forward email to me and gets an error code ERR-3375-T "sender address quota exceeded". Is this related to the current problems Homestead is experiencing and, if so, will it be resolved? If not, what should I do?

I think most of us have experienced trouble sending and receiving for an entire week now.

They say that something happened during transition from Intuit to Homestead. Whatever occurred requires them to replace all of the servers, but they have no idea how long it will take to resolve the issue. Last week they said it could be 2-3 days, but maybe longer, possibly weeks. No one really knows because they are not communicating with us effectively.

this has been poorly handled in the transition and poor notification of customers that the email service went down at all. it took a few of my customers and clients to tell me that they were getting email errors, not INTUIT OR HOMESTEAD.

I get a few emails through my hosted domain with HOMESTEAD, but i dont know how many i am loosing. my employees cannot even email me from within the same domain.

i am searching for a new domain host and email service, Homestead and Intuit are large enough companies that they should know how to migrate systems without a hitch and at least communicate with customers. dont expect us to monitor the chat rooms for fatal errors we dont know about.

These folks are great at sending email solicitations for upgrades and updates to products and services they offer, but customer service does not count.

Hope they have insurance against loss of business income for the unkown loss of business we are all experiencing.

I definitely agree...it's very unprofessional of them not to communicate with us. The only way to get any information is by monitoring the chat rooms. I think they are relying on most of us being small businesses and not having an IT department to assist us in moving to another company.

Bottom line, we can huff and puff and continue to beg Homestead for a resolution but that has been unsuccessful thus far...I think it comes down to a business decision to stay and tolerate this horrible customer service or leave and preserve our businesses.

I agree with both of you. About a week ago, I had one client call and say she sent to me two e-mails that bounced. A few minutes before she called, I had been e-mailing back and forth with another client with no problem, so I thought the issue was on her end or it was just a one time thing. I didn't find out until a few days later that it was a bigger problem. And...like everyone else, I found out by visiting this forum. I'm using my G-mail account as a back-up, but I have NO IDEA how many e-mails I've received or how many of my e-mails didn't make it to the intended recipient since there are no error messages. This is irreparable and unbelievable! I can forgive mistakes and problems but not purposeful cover-up and lack of communication. I'm in the middle of a big project this week so I don't have the time or energy to switch to another company...yet. But I will be. I'm so fed up with Homestead!

Excuse me, but I think we should be able to vent. Chatting with customer service gets us nowhere. I make my living to support my family through my website. My foremost means of client communication is email from my business domain. My clients are primarily attorneys, representatives of court cases, and government agencies. In the last two weeks they are not effectively receiving my email, much of which contains work product they are paying for. Their emails to me bounce with messages that Homestead rejected their messages or that my domain does not even exist. For the last week, NOTHING has worked. I cannot create email, cannot send email, delete email, send email to the spam folder, save drafts, access the address book, or have the recipients autofilled. Nothing. I tried to send a one sentence email today that hung up for 6 minutes. An earlier one hung up for 3 minutes. If anything does work it takes multiple attempts with at least 20-30 seconds to intiate, then usually at least 4-6 server error messages before the process completes or I give up. And Intuit's advice is to get a temporary email account with another service that DOES WORK? How am I going to notify all my contacts that I have a new temp email address when I cannot even access my Intuit address book or get an email to autofill the email address to cut and paste? Mine is not a case of experiencing some trouble, my email had major issues for the first week and has barely worked at all for the last week.

Dee Dee, you mentioned email that hung up for 6 minutes or taking multiple attempts with 20 to 30 seconds to initiate. During the last few days, my outbound emails and inbound emails (those that I know about) have had lapses of anywhere from 4 hours to 26 hours between the time they were sent and the time they were received. I'm trying not to get mad about this, so that I can make an objective decision about how I will most efficiently migrate my email service to another provider with as little disruption as possible to my business.

Most of my domains are slowly going back to normal but the www.americantraffic.com and www.clfdvm.com is still having serious send/receive issues and americantraffic.com is getting over 250 spam in less than 4 hours. I'm going to loose these customers if this is not resolved.

Like others, recipients are not receiving my emails and vice versa. Here's an error a client received using a gmail account. Some messages are coming through (mostly junk) but not all. Please explain to me what this means.:

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

jacquie(at)castawaytheclutter(dot)com

Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the server for the recipient domain castawaytheclutter(dot)com by inbound.homesteadmail.com. [209.157.71.80].

Some of my customers are reporting that their emails are being returned to them, with a "Sender address quota exceeded" message. When I login to the webmail interface (Zimbra / Homestead ... not sure what the right name is), it shows that I'm well within my quota. What is going on? Can this problem be rectified so that I don't miss any emails?? I'm still getting most of my emails I think, but at least 3 people have forwarded this to me on my other support address.
The returned email shows something like this:

So this email server has been blacklisted?
I cannot get my emails to go through.
PLEASE HELP!!!

This is the message I am receiving:
Connected to 12.102.252.75 but sender was rejected.
Remote host said: 521-67.222.51.50 blocked by sbc:blacklist.mailrelay.att.net.
521 DNSRBL: Blocked for abuse. See http://att.net/blocks

Hi Raymond1374, You will most likely not recieve some emails. The exact number is impossible to know. Much of it will depend on who the sender is and if their email client or service attempts redelivery, and how many attempts and over what period of time. Sorry.

This email and spam issue is horrible. Customers are NOT getting emails and wondering why I am ignoring them. Homestead is failing terribly in communicating what is going on, how they are fixing it and WHEN they might be close to fixing it. Homestead needs to act like they care about what is happening to their customers. POSTING DAILY more than once what is going on. I could NEVER recommend a company like this. YOU NEED TO COMMUNICATE !!!!!!!!